Category: Culture
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In a new piece for the Claremont Review of Books, I argue that Israel’s Temple Mount policy from its reclamation in 1967 to today — intended to appease Arab aggressors — is a microcosm of what ails the West. In fact, it reflects the perfect symbol of our civilization’s lack of confidence in its moral legitimacy, sovereignty, and the right to defend against aggression.

Here’s a taste:

Israel does not err alone. The Temple Mount, which is core to the Judeo-Christian world generally, and to Israel—which is the first line of defense of Western civilization against Islamic supremacism—is symbolic of the West’s broader ideological maladies. Leftism sees the West as an evil, oppressive, occupying force. The hysterical reaction to President Trump’s Poland speech in defense of Western civilization—which was read by the Left with scare quotes as a defense of racism and colonialism—is the product of such “progressive” brainwashing.

The West has deemed itself morally illegitimate, the decadent and depraved creation of dead European white males. To make up for real and imagined historic injustices, the West has frequently repudiated its fundamental principles, and actively undermined its institutions. Its crisis of moral legitimacy is revealed in virulently anti-religious secularism, and in attacks on the natural rights to life, liberty, and property by an administrative state operating without the consent of the people.

The West’s lack of confidence in its sovereignty is revealed in open-borders policies that result in endless migrant floods, regardless of whether the migrants will or can enhance economic or social development. Progressive activists go so far as to imply that every migrant—legal or not—has an inherent right to citizenship, or at least to the rights guaranteed by citizenship. The multicultural credo that holds all cultures to be equal and inherently valuable is thought to obviate the need for borders.

The West’s unwillingness to defend itself against Islamic aggression reveals itself in Europe’s “no-go zones.” In America, it reveals itself through our see-no-Islam national security and foreign policy, and in the pervasive belief that we must appease our enemies with bribery (Iran Deal), sacrifice our rights (anti-free speech measures so as not to offend), or remove our defenses through politically correct policies chiefly oriented towards concession rather than victory (“Countering Violent Extremism”). At the heart of these policies is a belief that the West is the aggressor, and our enemies are the aggrieved.

The West’s lack of confidence ultimately extends to its right to survive. If one of the least abashed Western nations won’t assert itself at Temple Mount, it is hard to be sure where other nations will draw lines they are prepared to defend without yielding.

During the interview, which you can listen to below, Prof. Latzer and I discuss a range of topics including Latzer’s difficulty in publishing a book that talks about the correlation between violent crime and race, the link between war and crime, the interesting theory of the inverse relationship between homicide and suicide rates, the surprising lack of correlation between economics and crime, what caused the spike of crime from the late 1960s through the early 1990s and the drastic plummet of rates from the late 1990s to today, the deep question of whether crime is attributable to economics or culture, and what the future of violent crime looks like in America:

I was honored and privileged that National Review invited me to write an article about my beloved pennant-winning New York Mets for my debut in that seminal publication.

Below is a representative sample from my paean to the Amazin’ Metropolitans:

The fates of the Mets and of America were joined, embodied in the Mets’ new ballpark, Citi Field, which opened in 2009. This characterless McMansion of a stadium — largely devoid of defining Mets-ness, save for a steroid-injected apple — was so titled thanks to a naming-rights deal effectively underwritten by the taxpayer. Like much of America’s housing stock, the Mets’ home, Citi Field would remain largely uninhabited during miserable years to come. The edifice literally rusted before it even saw its first game.

As the American economy slogged along, so too did the Mets, who found creative ways to fail en route to six straight losing seasons. Supposedly minor injuries festered and led to lost years. Management claimed it had funds to acquire talent, while continuously cutting back. The Mets’ debt ballooned as it serviced existing debt.

Early in 2015, the team’s imprudent and miserly majority owner was named the head of Major League Baseball’s Finance Committee. Was “failing upward,” as in politics, a new rule in MLB?

Then, just in time for Opening Day, Steve Kettmann’s book Baseball Maverick: How Sandy Alderson Revolutionized Baseball and Revived the Mets was published. How could anyone have the temerity to argue that the Mets’ general manager, who had not overseen a single winning Mets team, had revived the Metropolitans?

Demoralized, some Mets fans even put up billboards above the chop shops near Citi Field, urging the Mets’ owners to sell the team.

Here’s a taste of my latest at The Federalist,in which I question why Yale University is taking $10 million from a jihadi-tied Saudi billionaire to build an Islamic (read: Sharia) Law center that propagates an ideology under which Yale itself could not exist:

While America remains financially and militarily the mightiest nation on Earth, it is losing the war Islamic supremacism is waging against her because it is chiefly an ideological one. We have the strength to defend ourselves, but we lack the knowledge and the will to defeat our enemies. We are morally relativistic and therefore unable to acknowledge that different peoples are different and that not all ideologies are equal or seek the same ends.

But people like Saleh Kamal surely understand us. In the conquest ideology inherent to Sharia—Islam compels Muslims to extend the Islamic sphere, the ummah, over all the world—America has found an enemy able to best take advantage of our deeply held freedoms. Sharia explicitly calls for the use of the very tactics against which America is most vulnerable.

As a consequence of our willful blindness (contrasted with Islamic supremacists’ comparable clarity), we are constructing Islamic law centers, inviting Muslims to immigrate by the hundreds of thousands without recognition that Hijra is a form of jihad, and, 14 years after 9/11, our top military minds are arguing that we back al-Qaeda against ISIS—that is, the newly “good jihadists” against the “bad jihadists.” For the coup de grace, we are actively aiding, abetting, and enabling Iran’s Twelver jihadist regime in its quest for nuclear domination of the Middle East and beyond.

Michael Walsh’s new book The Devil’s Pleasure Palaceis pivotal in its explication of how poor and purely evil ideas have subverted America, and eaten away at the pillars of Western civilization.

While we often hear the refrain “ideas have consequences,” too frequently we attribute the decline of the American system to politics or particular political figures, while giving the power of ideas short thrift.

But as Walsh’s important work illustrates, ideas are everything, and if you lose the war of them you lose all of the other battles too.

One such idea that has trumped to date deals with “History” — which you would not dare be on the wrong side of — as if some metaphysical Berlin Wall.

Here is what Walsh has to say on the matter:

Progressives like to throw around the phrases “the arc of history” and “the wrong side of history.” Martin Luther King Jr., quoting the abolitionist Theodore Parker, formulated it this way: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But when you stop to think about this, it’s simply a wishful assertion with no particular historical evidence to back it up. Such sloganeering emerges naturally from the Hegelian-Marxist conception of capital-H History. The only teleology they can allow has to do with abstract, ostensibly “moral” pronouncements of a chimerical, ever-receding horizon of perfect “justice.” The moral universe must not and will not ever admit of amelioration in our lifetimes, or indeed any lifetimes, they insist. It is a Faustian quest, at once admirable and yet a fool’s errand; no means will ever suffice to achieve the end.

Isn’t it interesting that there can be some form of moral judgment in a morally relativistic, largely if not entirely amoral secular progressive system?